In this episode of ‘Nevermind the Pain Points’, host Tom Carpenter and guest Phil Boyden from Sojourn Solutions dive into the power of account-based marketing (ABM).
Whether you're a growing enterprise or an established player looking to refine your approach, this conversation will offer valuable insights into optimising your ABM approach. The duo explore real-world applications, the importance of cross-departmental collaboration, and how to effectively engage prospects at the right time.
Listen here or read on for an edited transcript:
Tom Carpenter: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode. I'm joined today by Phil Boyden from Sojourn Solutions. Welcome again, Phil. Great to have you on board.
Phil Boyden: Yeah, thanks, Tom. Great to be here again.
Tom Carpenter: My name is Tom Carpenter. I'm one of our lead to cash specialists here at Clarasys and CX Specialists. Clarasys and Sojourn have got a fruitful partnership where we work together across the lead to cash ecosystem. And Phil's going to be here today to talk to us a little bit about account-based marketing.
Tom Carpenter: So account-based marketing, hopefully for many of you, might not be a new thing, but it has evolved quite a lot in the past few years. It helps to attract people that you're already in contact with. It helps you to define the decision-makers and get the right things in front of the right people. And I think B2B purchasing is complex, right? We don't have single individuals involved in buying decisions. We have lots of people involved in considering how you engage with those individuals and you drive the right sort of personas. And you also ensure you're targeting the right accounts and right buyers for your product. Means they need a different way of thinking about things than you would in B2C marketing. So Phil, do you want to tell us a little bit about your perspective of account-based marketing and maybe what's a bit more emerging and what's going on in the market in terms of what products are available, what the best ways of working with account-based marketing is?
Phil Boyden: Yeah, sure. So I think in the last couple of years, maybe we're seeing more and more buying groups. There's a lot more people involved in the B2B life cycles and the different stages we go through. Meaning there's a lot more people kind of behind a curtain, people that we never get to access properly. So, you know, you work in the traditional way, marketing generates some leads and those leads get passed across to sales and sales are working with one, maybe two people out of that buying group with no way of anybody really influencing the remainder of that group and that's, Yeah, those numbers in the group seem to be rising almost on a monthly basis at the moment.
So at the moment, there's anything between seven and ten people involved in that group, and we can, we may be talking to one of them. So as they disappear behind closed doors and hold their conversations, we have no influence on them at all with traditional marketing techniques. So that's where ABM really helps because it helps spot those groups and helps us target the exact accounts and everything's skinned so that it actually really resonates to them whenever they engage in any of our collateral.
Tom Carpenter: And I think it kind of makes sense, but previously organisations might have seen marketing's role as driving in leads. And then as soon as there's a conversation, it gets handed over to sales, right? But we've spoken about this in previous podcasts as well. The need for sales and marketing to be a little bit more glued together, I think is really, really essential in the success of that organisation.
So how do these technologies maybe help marketers work more closely with sales in some of the ways? Maybe they do things like segmentation or in thinking about what those ideal customers might be?
Phil Boyden: Yeah, so the technologies definitely help, but I think it has to be the strategy that comes first. You need to be going a lot wider across the organisation than we did traditionally.
You know, we always used to talk about marketing and sales alignment, and shockingly, you would still go into companies where there wasn't any marketing sales alignment or people that didn't believe in marketing because they had their index of cards to work through and stuff like that. But I think it needs to go even further these days.
So, the marketing sales need to be aligned to what they're trying to achieve. But you also need the product guys in there. You need the operations team in there. And you actually need, so with the growth of the chief revenue, chief Growth offices and stuff. There's the business targets. What's the business trying to achieve?
And not the way it's going to suggest that marketing and sales fully achieve everything the business does, but what do they need to do to support those goals and ambitions? So when you track back from there, you can then look at, well, this year, you know, we're trying to bring on. So you can then look at your ideal customers from the past, you know, you can look at the sales cycles that led to those completing and you can really build nice tailored journeys with the right content for the right industries at the right time.
These platforms really support. So ABM, You know, if you track it all the way back, you'd be approaching certain companies and accounts, and you do that on a one to one basis. A sales guy can only handle maybe five or six accounts like that. And then you can go to one to few. So maybe you go into an industry or a niche area of an industry and that allows you to approach a bit more.
But what these platforms do, they allow you to really scale that up. So your collateral you're creating can actually be pushed out and personalised in front of multiple different kind of accounts and personas within those accounts to really get a huge audience going on.
Tom Carpenter: Something I'm sure we spoke to some sales teams 15 years ago, they would have told us, well, of course, You know, we target different accounts. That’s what we do. And often they would ask for marketing's assistance in order to achieve that. But I think there's a difference between doing that and asking marketing for help and doing that in a way where it's almost driven more by marketing than it is for sales and sales build this almost like trust therefore with marketing that they're doing the right thing.
How have you seen that change? Do you think over the past few years?
Phil Boyden: Yeah, so I suppose there was a time when traditionally a single salesperson would actually give a list of ‘these are the people I want you to approach today’. And at that point you need all their email addresses, basically. So who's here I want you to talk to, go and throw some stuff in front of their face, see how they feel about it.
The ABM approach, sales and marketing actually agree a target list to start with. So everything is aimed at those exact things. So it's not that marketing is being reactive to what sales needs at this moment. The whole approach is the same. And you need a team of people there and you need to readdress that on a regular basis.
So every three months maybe you go and tweak the actual target account list and annually people talk about actually having a proper rethink and seeing what needs to come off, what's going nowhere and what goes on. But the other thing with account-based marketing due to the B2B kind of life cycle is it's not a quick thing. So if you are trying stuff for three months and deciding that we didn't get any more closed one opportunities is as you need to think about it differently, I suppose. So the metrics you're putting in place to look at the success would be maybe funnel velocity, average deal size, that sort of thing.
So if you're really targeting the people, you know, want to buy from you or could be buying from you and you're hitting them at the right time and you're putting the right information in front of them that tends to help the sales cycle flow faster and also to put more money on the table.
Tom Carpenter: And previously we've talked about marking techniques which require us to already have a pretty known audience.
That means we obviously need email addresses, essentially, and we're contacting them through channels where we've already got that engagement. So with account-based marketing, could we be starting from a point where we don't have that? In which case, what channels are we using? How do we get that initial engagement on account-based marketing compared to that known audience we already have?
Phil Boyden: Sure. So a few of the account-based marketing platforms available out there now have intent data. So what that means is you've got keywords. So you know that if people are looking for a certain product or certain services, they'll be looking for certain things. They might be reading articles on these things, searching these things, downloading white papers, and that's not necessarily going to be from your own websites or your own actual collateral that you're throwing out there because you don't know who they are yet.
They might not even be in your database and they've got no clue who you are. So what the intent data allows is that these platforms are kind of plugged into all these places around the internet and they can actually say well these people are actually looking at your website. This and the moment they're looking at these things.
So because you've got a knowledge of the IP address they're on or a cookie that may be dropped somewhere, you can actually target those people while they're looking into these different products or solutions and you can drop your kind of narrative in front of them while they're doing that. So it's at the very moment that they're doing it.
A few of these, you've got the intent, but you also have access to demand side platforms that serve up those ads. So you've got an instant link between that intent or the surges in interest and being able to put your name out there.
Tom Carpenter: So this would be through, I guess, from a B2B context, there'll be things like, I'm just online in general. So maybe I'm on certain sites, it's got banner ads, or I'm on LinkedIn. What kind of advertising or marketing channels would be?
Phil Boyden: Yeah. So yeah, the banner ads and the LinkedIn, just like you're saying, that's a great way of getting out in front of people that wouldn't otherwise know how to communicate with you.
As you go further down there and people do put their names in for a whitepaper. Then maybe at that point you'll get an email address and you can come back into more traditional marketing automation. So, on our team call the other week, Dan was talking about, sorry, he's one of our partners at Sojourn.
Tom Carpenter: I know Dan, don't worry. Good guy, good guy.
Phil Boyden: So, he was basically talking about a company that he was assessing their sales cycle and there was a massive surge of engagement quite regularly around seven months before the actual closed one. Point came along. So that allows you to, by that point, you've seen the surge. You've hopefully managed to get your right materials in front of them. So they're interested enough to give you their information to download some distant pieces collateral. And then you can actually move into a more traditional nurture campaign, maybe run through the market automation platform, getting that right bits of, cause you know, the journey, you can almost condense that journey and speed up that. So that's when the funnel velocity. So you've got the intent for that initial reach out. You see the search and engagement, and then you can actually speed up that funnel velocity, sometimes just directly through the ABM platforms, depending how they work and if they're throwing it straight to sales, or you can drop into market automation, it allows us to see the full journey and because the departments are working neatly together, everyone knows what that journey is and what they're aiming at. So there's no surprises with the leads that do arrive.
Tom Carpenter: So does that mean marketing teams who are doing much more account based marketing, that, as you say, it's having really clear strategy on who you're targeting and how you're going to target them or are there elements of technology or you've seen different processes where it almost like automates doing some of that for you. Has anything changed in the world of account based marketing and how much of that is automated do you think? Or is that still on the hype curve?
Phil Boyden: It's a tricky one to answer really, to be honest for me. So I think without the strategy, knowing who you're targeting and that you're not going to get the right materials together to actually serve the right content. So you're still going to be kind of shooting in the dark a little, I would say. So that the platforms definitely help, because they allow you to stuff out at the right time and stuff that, but without a clear strategy on who you're targeting, so the accounts, the industries, potentially the personas within that and having the right actual information to push out there without that in place, it's not really going to have many benefits. I wouldn't have thought you're still just throwing the wrong things out, even if it is at the right time.
Tom Carpenter: Because you'd hope that most marketing teams would probably understand they've got different buyers and they'd be targeted with different information. So do we get into the depths of knowing what specific accounts might be up to? Are we going to get down to sort of individual account sort of level?
Phil Boyden: Yes, it does. So the intent data does tell you exactly who's been interacting with your website at an account level and the number of hits at an account level. With the one platform I've been looking into recently it's really clear who's been hitting your website at certain times so that's your own information but then you've got the keywords and that intent coming in and you can marry up the two then yes you know that three people from that company have been hitting your website you know who they are apart from that you're kind of fishing in the dark still so that intent data allows you to target a lot more of those people at the same time.
Tom Carpenter: Yeah. Okay. I've got you. So we know that from, let's say like news outlets and media, we might know what's going on with some companies, but we can enrich that with how they're engaging with us to come with a super personalised way of approaching those accounts. We can kind of marry those two data sets together almost to create something very personalised.
Phil Boyden: Yeah. That intent side of it does allow us to reach people that we never ever would, and allows us to almost shine a torch I've kind of come up with a lot of dark metaphors today. Perhaps you should call it dark pool or something like that. But it allows us to actually interact with the people we would never get to meet at the right time.
So I see adverts going past for stuff that I've searched in the past and because it's not instantly recent, I'm not actually interested in it. So it's like you almost ignore it. But if something pings up just at the right time, I think you get a lot more results from that, whether it's B2C or B2B, but certainly when there's such a long cycle hitting people at the right time when they're initially doing the research and the people right at the top of the company who are researching some stuff and then hand it over to juniors, but it's actually really that top person you need to be influencing maybe in eight months time once all the research has been done and they start reaching out to people, you need to make sure that you're in the room for that conversation.
Tom Carpenter: Yeah. Okay. So it's trying to apply some more real time marketing methods to account based marketing so that we can kind of enrich what individuals are doing with what the organisation's doing in general. Yeah.
Phil Boyden: And I suppose the other thing with account based marketing, you don't need to go and boil the ocean straight away.
So if you agree with sales and marketing, this is what we're really trying to do. You can really hone in on a certain area of the business and start small. So at that point, you are just maybe focusing on selling a new product line, perhaps to existing customers, or you're just trying to expand into another region.
So you're fully focused on all the ideal customers within that region. That small area. So yeah, if you start too big, I think again, you're going to hit issues, but yeah.
Tom Carpenter: And we touched on this a little bit earlier as well, I guess that's because this is for some, although it sounds like the same way of doing marketing, it is a little bit different.
Maybe there's way more collaboration upfront with sales and marketing, but also, as you say, this is a marketing tool. Even once you already have some contact with individuals and you know about them. So does that mean organisations need to think differently? Or do you think they need to do anything and how they operate to set themselves up for ABM? What kind of advice would you give organisations?
Phil Boyden: Definitely you need to be starting slightly differently. So you do need the whole approach, including the content at the different times, needs to be a collaboration across your sales, marketing, product, customer success. Cause even once you've made a sale, if you've got a different product line that your customers aren't necessarily aware of, or a different side of the business, then customer success could also use the support to get that information out there because they might be in there with the company talking to day in day out, but not the right area of the company to buy something else that they could be working with.
So it's definitely collaboration across you'd need a leadership team, a team that actually are pioneering ABM across your company. And the idea there is they can meet it regularly, check everything's on track. How are the different representatives from the different departments? They can see how things are working out for them.
And you can fine tune that as you go along, weekly, when you're first. Kind of setting off down this path and then you can kind of ease that off slightly once things are really running well.
Tom Carpenter: I think also the kind of easy way to maybe think about this is maybe sales teams before they did a lot of outbound, a lot of outreach and you had your kind of more classic business development sort of managers and then your sales reps, your account managers and then marketing.
Whereas I guess some of that stuff which the business development managers are doing is they're working their way through an account list and they're trying to access people. That can be quite challenging. Time intensive, maybe you're having to do some calls, maybe you're actually going out to businesses.
Now you don't need to do that as much, right? Now people are online a lot more and these marketing capabilities can do a lot of what some of those, I guess, less lucrative sales kind of tactics would do. You don't need lots of people and lots of effort going into that anymore.
Phil Boyden: Yeah, I'd agree. And we're also seeing kind of those, I see them closing off slightly as well.
I think people are getting less out of inmail through LinkedIn these days. GDPR, and that means that, you know, you're risking things slightly just by throwing emails at people, unless you've got legitimate interest, but I think there's only so many times you can call that as well before. You know, you're on shaky ground.
So, and we've got in over in the US, if you go globally on this, you know, Canada, obviously Germany, that always was more that way with a double opt in side of things. So, and states in the US are now picking up on this and it's becoming more and more common that we can't just kind of knock on a door with a cold approach.
So I think having this ABM approach where you know who you want to target, but anonymised when they're interested, I think that is, I mean that, that's kind of legitimate interest on steroids, really, isn't it?
Tom Carpenter: Absolutely.
Phil Boyden: Yeah, you actually, you genuinely know they're interested, but you can still push stuff in front so they come in to you so you get that permission.
Tom Carpenter: Yeah, that's true, I guess, because you're looking at permissions sometimes as an organisation level if you're having lots of conversations with different people. So does that mean with ABM, maybe it's easier to be contacting people than it is in kind of individual sense? Or is that still a little bit unclear, do you think?
Phil Boyden: Well, certainly with the demand side platform side of things, you know that you can be minimalist on what you're spending on your advertising. And know it's hitting the right people at the right time, so you can reduce your budget and hit the right people. And by doing that and hitting them when they are of interest, then you give them the opportunity to to actually opt in to the remainder of your kind of outreach as well.
Tom Carpenter: Okay. So I guess what kind of organisations should be doing ABM? That's the trick question.
Phil Boyden: Well, it depends on scale, I suppose. I do think you need to scale up to these things. So you have, in my opinion, I think a company needs to have quite a few product lines. They need to be big enough that there is interest coming in in their direction.
Okay. This is a really hard question.
Tom Carpenter: Well, I was semi teeing you up for maybe the answer is all B2B organisations, but you are right. It's probably not. Yeah. It can't be every organisation. If you're a three or four person outfit, but you're maybe delivering some services and maybe you only have one or two customers and that's the sense of your ambition and it doesn't make sense.
But maybe let's look at that and more large scale enterprise companies.
Phil Boyden: Yeah.
Tom Carpenter: Do you think there are any kind of industries or any particular organisations that if you're a B2B customer, so I think we're kind of, were obviously, it doesn't really make much sense, so we're looking at B2B or maybe B2B to C, kinda situations where it makes sense.
Yeah. Do you think there's any reason why people wouldn't be or shouldn't be doing ABM?
Phil Boyden: So, from my tastes, I suppose ABM allows us to approach companies that we wouldn't necessarily know who they are. They might not necessarily be in the database. We don't know if they're interested in our product at that point.
But we know they're an ideal customer profile. But, depending on what you're selling, that's thousands of companies that may or may not be interested. So, I think, if you're a massive company and you're a household name, maybe ABM isn't the right way to go. Perhaps it's not necessary. You don't necessarily need to say to people, Hey, I'm here at the right time because I provide this service.
Cause globally, almost people would know that's what you do as a company. So I think it's the emerging B2B companies who actually, you know, the ones that are just trying to get to scale up, to really get more interest, get their name out more. And it's kind of, people say it's, is it seven or eight times that someone needs to see a logo before they'll actually recognise it. And I'd imagine the number of logos we've got, if we think about the map of Martech logos these days, if people are throwing that many logos at you, I'd put money on that number being higher these days for the number of times people need to see a logo before it really sinks in. But I think it's the companies that are on the verge of growing and could become large, that's when ABM would have a massive effect, I would say.
Tom Carpenter: I can think of some scenarios where people might argue they don't need to. Let's say one where I've got a really saturated market. Well that you need to because then you probably know that there are very few organisations who aren't buying from you so you can be really targeted with your marketing.
Phil Boyden: Yeah.
Tom Carpenter: Or maybe, as you said, you've got lots of different brands. Maybe there's a way of combining those together or offering something in a different way, which opens up a whole new set of businesses to, which again, if you think through kind of how that's presented, that could be, uh, maybe a subsection of an industry or, or it could be maybe you're now able to offer products to small to medium sized businesses, whereas before it was very much only enterprise businesses would buy from you, for example.
So I think there's a thing where it's like, even if you think you've got most of the target market, well, in that case, ABM definitely makes sense for you, or maybe you're one that isn't and you're trying to explore how your different products can apply. Because the other thing we've not talked about here is ABM gives you so much insight into how organisations interact with you, not just individuals.
And I think that's so much more powerful in a B2B context and just individuals. Because in individuals, you may be just making broad assessments of how certain segments of individuals interact with you. Whereas companies, you can see that it kind of almost like built some momentum when you were talking about certain problem cases that organisations have, because lots of businesses have the same challenges and same problems.
We've just seen that ourselves in selling consulting services and going into businesses, right? It's very similar problems. So like, how do you get feedback on whether it's the right problems that are testing? With ABM, it is much more successful in learning things about how things land, whereas often it can be a lot harder when you're targeting individuals to know, did it just work for that person because there are too many factors at play.
Phil Boyden: Yeah. So I suppose when you're targeting the individuals at a lead level or a personal level, you don't necessarily know where they sit within that team of purchases either. So it could be that you see someone, they're downloading a white paper, they've given you email address, and they're downloading all the right stuff.
And you're thinking this has to be the guy, this is who I'm going to chase. So you start sending all this stuff out, but they are actually downloading stuff for a research project that wasn't really linked to the account they're working for, or they just had a mild interest because they think of expanding their own horizons.
But even so, you don't know who's got that buyer permission, you know, where do they sit within that group? I suppose is the important stuff. A broader account knowledge gives you that, even if you don't know who it is exactly that will make the final decision, if they're a decision maker, or just a minor researcher.It doesn't matter if you know that there's an actual big flash of intent going within that account, you can still get the right message in front of people.
Tom Carpenter: So let me power phrase slightly cheekily, a few things that you've said here, Phil. So most B2B organisations you might expect to be doing ABM. And we've talked about some cases where smaller organisations might not, but whether you're growing, whether you're already quite dominant in the market, whether you're changing your products, it makes a lot of sense.
Tom Carpenter: Part of the reason I've heard from you that you think that's the case, and I completely resonate with as well, is you get a lot more return on investment for some of those marketing activities you're targeting specific accounts and clients, you know are already engaging with you or you know the level of intent they have. So it's much more likely to show kind of and be able to build a much stronger pipeline. And the other thing, which potentially probably an unintended consequence, but as a consulting firm, where we encourage our clients to collaborate between functions, and we believe that builds a better customer experience, is also that it It can enable sales and marketing to be working much more closely together, which as a result of that maybe means you don't need people doing outbound kind of sales activities anymore because you've got marketing being much more effective in doing that and sales and marketing kind of trust each other in terms of the quality of the leads that they're driving, being the right ones and, and being helpful for sales.
Would you say there's anything else that I've missed off of that? Does that rendition resonate with what you said?
Phil Boyden: No, I think that resonates really well. And it was said nicely in a lot less words than I would have used to get there. But I suppose, whereas people talk about marketing handing over to sales and whether they're happy with each other, if you really get the strategy right and build your teams correctly with ABM, you're actually working as a single team anyway.
So there isn't that, you know, if things aren't quite working out between you, you work out what's going wrong. You know, ignore the leads that are coming in because the demand gen engine has got thousands of leads, but only two are relevant. You know that everyone's pushing to get the right quality running between the departments. So there's more of a joint ownership. So it allows, it's not just the customer journey, I think it's the employees that get a better journey going on because they can really focus in on what they're doing.
Tom Carpenter: Yeah, I totally agree with that.
Phil Boyden: And we were talking about right messages at one point in the right place.
But the other thing, of course, is physical events that they're coming back. A lot now people are going into offices more than that. So when you've really targeted who you're going for and where they are, actually your field sales reps can be working in the right cities. Your events can be run in the right places so that, you know, there's a good percentage of your ideal customers that are actually going to be present. So you can really fine tune where your budget is spent, knowing that you're going to get the best return on it as well.
Tom Carpenter: Yeah, that's very true. I love attending an event, and it's the ones which are kind of much more specific to what I'm thinking about or what's important to me at the moment that I think resonates.
So if you can really land an event, topic and kind of subject area, which resonates with as many of your customers as possible, then that's a really successful spend on your marketing return, but hopefully it's also really insightful for them. So I guess you need that insight from across different accounts in order to know what's most insightful.
So yeah, often we think about marketing as digital marketing, but you're absolutely right. This is really powerful for physical marketing as well.
Phil Boyden: Yeah, and it's something that ties it all together. So your events team is driven by the intent data from marketing, who've agreed what they want with sales.
There isn't a kind of a team feeling that they can take responsibility or claim all success or be responsible again for all failures. I think it's a great way of people sitting under chief revenue and chief growth. You know, it allows that sort of single mindset.
Tom Carpenter: Yeah, absolutely. I agree.
I think, yeah, hopefully removing the silos of marketing and sales is happening for other reasons. But yeah, if you already have that kind of revenue and growth kind of officer or structure mindset, then you should hopefully already have sales and marketing working together, in which case. ABM is kind of the key choice that you want to be making in terms of how you do your marketing, right?
Phil Boyden: Yeah, sure.
Tom Carpenter: Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Phil. Been a really interesting conversation from my point of view and hopefully for our listeners as well.
Phil Boyden: Yeah, hopefully. It's been great being here again.
Tom Carpenter: All right. Thank you so much.
Phil Boyden: Bye bye.
Thank you for joining us for another episode of Never Mind the Pain Points. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe on your favourite podcasting app or site. We would love your feedback, so please leave a review or drop us an email at podcast. clarasys. com. And for more information about us, visit our website clarasys.com.
Guest bio:
Phil is a Marketing Operations Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, and specialises in helping organisations drive revenue through MarTech.
You can find Phil on LinkedIn here.